Advertising
One of the cool things about branding is that it isn’t static. It’s never “done.” You can always say or do something new and find unexplored levers to pull. Building a brand identity rooted in a strategic foundation isn’t the final piece; it’s the first. Once you know who you are and what you’ve got, you can go into the world and talk about it. Cue marketing and advertising.
The market has a noticeable education gap concerning branding, marketing, and advertising campaigns. In simple terms, marketing is identifying customer needs and determining how best to meet those needs. Advertising is promoting a company and its products or services through paid, earned, or social media ads. In other words, advertising is an active component of marketing.
Advertising services an ongoing, sustained conversation with consumers. Campaigns allow brands to communicate specific messages to a targeted audience in specific media channels.
Are you looking to launch a new hospitality destination in your city? Are you working to introduce your outdoor gear to a new audience? Are you offering a new service that would be super helpful to entrepreneurs? Or do you want to remind your core audience what makes your product great? Maybe there is a cultural trend happening that you can tap into. These are all scenarios that can call for advertising.
With consumers bombarded by thousands of messages daily, businesses must cut through the clutter to capture attention and drive meaningful engagement. In today’s saturated marketplace, standing out with advertising is no easy feat. A smart ad agency with analytical and creative chops can help.
As a branding agency offering advertising services, we understand what it takes to craft compelling campaigns that strengthen your brand’s core foundation, resonate deeply with your audience, and produce results for your business. The definition of an advertising company is changing—we’re not a traditional advertising agency, and we like it that way. Our clients second that sentiment. Here’s our approach to creating advertising that stands out in today’s competitive landscape.
1. Deep Audience Understanding: Crafting for the Right Crowd
Before the creative exercise of writing and crafting ads, captivating advertising starts with a comprehensive understanding of your audience. This means going beyond demographics and tapping into psychographics, behaviors, motivations, and needs. We need to know what drives your audience, what problems they’re trying to solve, and how your product or service fits into their lives.
Segmentation
Smart segmentation divides your audience into distinct groups, allowing you to create highly personalized messages. It can also inform which media advertising should target.
The more specific your targeting, the better the response. This isn’t limited only to demographics. Identifying and tapping into an audience mindset is even more important.
In the world of branding and marketing, the concept of the smallest viable market, as discussed in Seth Godin’s book This is Marketing, offers a compelling approach for brands, especially small businesses, to effectively reach their audience. The idea is that rather than pursuing a broad audience, advertising should drill down to a specific niche that you can target and capture much more of.
This precise targeting is often what distinguishes successful brands—especially early in their life cycles. Companies like Yeti started with tightly defined audiences and grew significantly over time. Their initial focus helped them establish a strong brand identity, which then broadened organically.
Many brands, in their quest for growth, fall into the trap of attempting to appeal to everyone, which can dilute their message and impact.
Positioning
Once you understand your audience it’s vital to craft a strategy to position your brand to the group. In a noisy marketplace, a brand must claim a distinct position that sets it apart from competitors.
Trout and Reis take an awesome stance on positioning in their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. In a nutshell, if you are not eagerly sending potential business to your competitors, then you don’t actually have a position. Basically, you’re saying, “We’re for everyone, and you’re everyone.” You can see how that message is less than compelling.
Strong positioning says, “If you want an expertly designed $300 cooler that can keep ice cold for days and withstand a bear attack, that’s what we make. If you want a low-grade, inexpensive solution that will only last a year, call brand X. Here’s their website. We don’t compete with them.”
2. Clear, Concise Messaging: Simplicity Wins
In an age of information overload, simplicity is powerful. Your message should be clear, direct, and easily digestible in just a few seconds. When advertising is too complex or overloaded with information, you risk losing the viewer’s attention before your message lands. This doesn’t mean we should dumb down our message; it simply means we should distill it down to its core potency.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
What is the biggest aspect or feature that differentiates your brand or product from the other guys? It seems obvious, but it’s vital to identify what sets your brand apart and communicate that in a compelling, straightforward way. Whether called a value proposition, a differentiating message, a brand promise, a unique selling proposition, or something else, ads that succeed include a clear reason for the customer to buy.
Your USP should shine through every ad. Oddly, a lot of advertising today loses sight of this simple maxim. Creativity is king in advertising, but it has to solve the problem of delivering your primary message to the world. Advertising creative should clearly tie back to USP, which should reflect the core foundation and strategy for the brand: its north star, reason for being, and WHY.
Focus on One Key Message
“Boil down your strategy to one single promise.”
—David Ogilvy
Simplicity is one of the hardest tasks to achieve in the advertising world. Ogilvy was one those creative leaders that hated cluttered thinking, but revered clarity of thought. The best creative ideas deftly distill simple, albeit poignant, strategy into a singular statement that speaks volumes. Mediocre ideas often come from a lack of focus, USP, or strategy.
An ad is not a novel or a movie; it’s a haiku or a short. Instead of cramming multiple points into one ad, focus on a single, central idea. This makes it easier for your audience to remember and engage with your brand.
Features vs Benefits
Some of the best advertising transcends function and shifts the focus from features to benefits.
While marketers often highlight their products’ features, believing they are the key selling points due to the work involved in their development, it’s the benefits these features provide that truly resonate with consumers. Communicate how your product or service fits into consumers’ lives or works to make them better, more productive, happier, and more fulfilled.
For example, Apple iPods could have focused on the product’s features, with advertising highlighting their new Bluetooth wireless technology. Instead, they highlighted the benefits: no more tangled cords tethering you to your device. Apple communicated this brilliantly, without words, with ads that showed vibrant human silhouettes dancing freely to music without restriction.
Benefits come in different flavors and strengths as well. Emotional benefits resonate with the attitudes and aspirations of shoppers, making them feel good about buying and supporting your brand. Social benefits are more outward-facing when an item or brand affiliation says something about the buyer and their personality. These can be particularly powerful because people want to be seen as aligned with the brand.
This distinction between features and benefits is crucial in crafting advertising that speaks directly to what customers genuinely care about, moving beyond the functional details to the actual impact on their daily lives.
3. Creativity and Storytelling: Engage with Narrative
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in advertising. Humans are hardwired to respond to stories, and great storytelling can make your brand memorable. A creative narrative allows you to demonstrate your brand’s personality, evoke emotions, and convey your message in a way that feels engaging rather than intrusive.
We like to think of ads as an act of service, rather than sales. What can you do to bring value to someone’s life? How can you amuse or inspire? The best advertising makes sure that the recipient gets something out of the deal.
Visual Storytelling
The power of imagery and visuals should enhance your message. Whether through stunning photography, clever illustrations, or compelling video production, visuals can tell a story much quicker than text. The best ads pair visuals and language to tell different parts of the same story, without redundancy of clutter.
Unexpected Angles
Don’t be afraid to approach your advertising from a unique perspective. In fact, strive for it. Ads that surprise or challenge the norm tend to break through the clutter and leave a more lasting impression. The key is to center the ad in a “brand truth”—a true key aspect of the brand—versus an empty performance to get noticed. Consumers see cheap trick tactics coming a mile away, and lose interest.
Emotion-Based Messaging
It’s not surprising that ads that connect on an emotional level tend to be most memorable. Humor, nostalgia, hope, or surprise all hold the power to jolt people out of their current state. It’s not just about getting people to like the content— the best advertising ties that lightbulb moment to a product or call to action. Otherwise, people may not remember the details of your product, even though they may remember how your ad made them feel.
Authenticity & Humanity
These two aspects of brand and advertising may be the most frequently cited and discussed at our agency. It may sound quaint, but in everything we do, we strive to talk to people like human beings, not consumers, demographics, or target audiences. Those are relevant data segments, but they aren’t definitive. No one on this planet identifies primarily as “an 18–24-year-old upper middle-class urban dweller.”
In crafting a message to people, don’t be afraid to get personal. You might be surprised how many people have noticed the same quirky part of the world that’s lodged in your mind. Transcending transactional communication in favor of insight and connection is powerful. James Joyce nailed it when he wrote, “In the particular is contained the universal.”
Advertising is often most powerful when it poses a question that the viewer answers themselves. An ad that allows people to fill in the blanks or come to the punchline on their own is far more impactful than spoon-feeding a message. Trusting the intelligence of the viewer allows you to reap benefits far more profound than just being top of mind.
Personalization
Personalization is potent in a world where consumers are increasingly expecting tailored experiences. Generic, one-size-fits-all messaging rarely resonates with today’s audiences. Instead, people want to feel like your brand understands their individual needs. Social media advertising offers an opportunity to personalize messages to viewers down the street and around the world. Targeted opt-in advertising and marketing boast a range of services for personalization as well. Large or small, finding opportunities for personalization in your advertising will pay dividends.
4. Meeting Your Audience Where They Are
Today, consumers interact with brands across multiple platforms: TV, social media, mobile apps, websites, and many more. To create compelling advertising, your brand should be visible and consistent across these touchpoints, ensuring a seamless experience for your audience.
We have created campaigns in practically every media platform available, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages based on myriad factors. Your industry, product type, audience, and much more will determine the proper channels for your brand.
The nuance of building a media plan for a brand is far too intricate to outline here in total, which is precisely why it’s an exercise on its own. Traditionally, a full-service advertising agency means a large company with every service under one roof, from creative to media buying. We like the agility of a smaller dedicated team with a roster of trusted vendors that can pick the right partners for the job. We work with those counterparts to craft marketing and media buying plans specific to needs, budget, geography, audience, and a host of other factors.
However, there are some universal overarching principles we tend to follow.
Digital Advertising Services: Getting on the Right Screens
By no means does a brand have to cover every available channel today, but maintaining consistency and frequency in your chosen channels is a must. Knowing your audience is vital in determining where to advertise. What are their habits? Do they spend most of their free time on social media? Do they prefer TikTok over Facebook?
Traditional media, like billboards, TV, or radio, require your audience to be in the right place at the right time to connect to your message. Social media marketing and online advertising services viewers where they live “naturally,” ensuring more eyeballs in your bullseye than a more traditional marketing agency might grab.
Omnichannel Consistency: Multiple Impactful Impressions
Consistency is a key element of omnichannel marketing, which is a customer-centric approach that aims to create a consistent brand experience across all channels. The holistic approach considers the customer experience at every channel and touchpoint for your business: your social media management, web design, marketing comms, salespeople, and, of course, advertising—anywhere customers can interact with your brand during their buying journey and even post-sale.
Every touchpoint should be interconnected and provide an identical level of service and communication. In other words, an omnichannel presence means maintaining a united, universal approach to customer engagement. Ensuring that your brand messaging and visuals remain consistent across all platforms builds trust and recognition, as consumers often need multiple touchpoints with a brand before making a purchase decision. Search engine optimization can also amplify these efforts.
Adapting to Each Channel
While consistency is essential, adapting your content to suit each media platform is equally crucial. Consistency does not necessarily mean rote repetition, however. The best advertising provides refreshing variety across platforms while maintaining an even tone, look, message, and personality.
YouTube advertising may require creative elements different from those for social media ads on Instagram or Facebook. Online advertising across platforms is not one size fits all. To maximize their effectiveness, we tailor ads to fit the strengths of each outlet. We are also increasingly turning to a variety of soft marketing tools to round out campaigns. Content marketing has proven to be valuable for brands, and we champion it because it fits with our ethos of providing value to people rather than pitching a hard sell.
We have also become big fans of permission marketing, a marketing strategy that involves asking for consent before sending promotional messages to an audience. It’s more intimate and less invasive than online marketing and a great way to build trust and relationships with customers—by providing relevant content they’ve requested and want to receive.
Each of these “softer” tactics takes more time and effort to execute but costs far less in terms of media spend—and often boasts a bigger impact on message retention.
Though the bulk of our advertising work is focused on digital marketing services, we must admit that we still love traditional advertising. Seeing your product blazing on a billboard above the city is always exhilarating. Whether it’s a mural, kiosk, bus wrap, or even in print, there’s just something about seeing a brand in the real world that makes an impact.
5. Maximizing Impact Through Analytics
Gone are the days of launching ads into the ether and hoping for the best. Today’s advertising landscape allows for a wealth of data collection to measure the effectiveness of ads, providing invaluable insights into performance and audience engagement. Data-driven advertising not only helps us refine your campaigns but also ensures that every dollar spent delivers the best possible return.
Campaign and media management is an ongoing process of testing the creative work, changing based on insight, and evolving your advertising strategy. Much like building a media plan, the nuance of determining the best analytics approach is specific to each campaign, but here are a few approaches to getting the most bang for your buck.
Pre-Testing Analytics
While many testing methods are consistent among most advertising agencies, we employ one analytics platform that is unique both in its timing and results.
For years, we have utilized industry-leading eye-tracking technology in both our branding work and in traditional and digital marketing. This elegant and powerful tool lets us assess a wide range of data before we finalize creative efforts, allowing us to enhance the quality and impact of a campaign. We get real-time information on everything from areas of interest and attention to clarity, focus, and cognitive demand.
Our pre-testing tools can forecast audience attention on visual layouts with 95% accuracy, providing predictive insights into how consumers will react to the creative within 5 seconds of viewing. It’s a powerful source of feedback that lets us review and optimize ads before they even launch in the market.
A/B Testing
Continuously testing different variations of your ads, especially early in a campaign cycle, allows us to learn what works best and adapt. This can involve changing the copy, visuals, call-to-action, or even the platform. We use data from A/B testing to optimize your ads in real-time.
Performance Metrics
Tracking key metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and engagement is another way we assess campaign effectiveness. Analytics platforms provide deep insights that can guide strategic decisions and adjustments.
